Steven Cox started an Internet business in part to keep the most talented member of his local rock band from giving up on music.

The drummer, who had an advanced degree in music, couldn’t support himself playing gigs. He had gotten little traction giving music lessons. He had lined up a job outside of music.

“He was trying to buy a house and had his first child on the way,” Cox said. “I started thinking about the evolution of marketplaces online. We had seen Amazon absolutely crush it when it came to moving products over the Internet. I felt there would come a day when people would be just as attuned to buying services over the Internet.”

So in 2006, Cox founded TakeLessons. Today, the San Diego company provides an online marketplace for linking music teachers with students in more than 4,000 cities. It aims to be for music teachers what online reservation marketplace OpenTable is for restaurants.

Of course, there are many more restaurant reservations booked each day than music lessons. That limits the revenue potential for TakeLessons, which takes a cut of 15 percent to 20 percent of each lesson given.

Moreover, TakeLessons doesn’t have the music market all to itself. Competitors such as Musika offer similar online marketplaces.

TakeLessons, though, recently expanded beyond music. It’s now applying its online platform to help students find academic tutors, dance and acting teachers and foreign language instructors. It plans to branch into other services as well.

TakeLessons is one of a number of e-commerce companies looking to create the next generation of online marketplaces that link consumers with service providers, not products. Five years ago, this was the domain of Craigslist, said Cox. Today, firms such as publicly traded OpenTable and others are seeking to build more-sophisticated online platforms.

It’s still too early to say whether TakeLessons can strike a chord as an online marketplace in other industries, especially where there are already competitors. The privately held company declined to disclose revenue.

If it does resonate, however, TakeLessons would be taking a page from San Diego’s Provide Commerce — which operates the gift-giving online marketplaces ProFlowers, RedEnvelope, Shari’s Berries, Cherry Moon Farms and Personal Creations. Provide Commerce was purchased by Liberty Media in 2005 for $477 million.

“Are there going to be winners in each vertical, like OpenTable has done with restaurants, or is it going to be a situation where someone builds a trusted brand and effectively pivots into all sorts of other verticals?” said Jonathan Sills, a former Provide Commerce executive and adviser to TakeLessons. “I think it is going to be interesting to see how that develops.”

Music teachers register with the company and undergo a criminal-background check, as well as other screening procedures. Teacher profiles are posted on TakeLessons’ website. Teachers are marketed to prospective students over the Internet, including a tool that can post a teacher’s TakeLessons profile on Craigslist.

Students seeking an instructor view the profile, read reviews and see a Yelp-like star rating, which TakeLessons curates based on student feedback, how quickly teachers respond to student requests and so on.

“There’s a correlation between how long they are keeping their instructor and the level of quality,” Cox said. “So the longer an instructor keeps students, the higher the score.”

The company handles bookings, billing and communication, including email reminders of upcoming lessons. It allows instructors to update their availability in real time.

Betsy Faust, a voice, violin and viola teacher, wasn’t having much luck attracting students on her own. She signed up with a TakeLessons rival, but it was based on the East Coast and didn’t generate much business.

“I had six or eight students,” she said. “I was like, ‘All right, I’ll give (TakeLessons) a try. What’s one more platform?’ ”

Within a matter of weeks, her business picked up. Now she has 30 or 40 students. What has pleased her most, however, is that the students she’s getting from TakeLessons are motivated.

“I’m getting students who want to practice and who want to learn and are excited for me to show up every week,” she said. Faust believes that’s because students request the teacher with TakeLessons. With some other music lesson marketplaces, teachers reach out to potential students.

TakeLessons has raised $12 million in capital from Bay Area venture firms Crosslink Capital, SoftTech and others. The company employs 62 workers, mostly in San Diego. Cox has been involved in a couple of technology companies, including working in business development for now-defunct CollegeClub.com.

Corwin Cole of Las Vegas has been an academic tutor for 13 years, mostly teaching math. He eased off his tutoring duties a few years ago to become a coach to professional poker players. Looking to get back to more tutoring, he signed up with TakeLessons.

“They have done a really good job of vetting students,” Cole said. “They tend to ask students detailed questions about what they are looking for, so I can quickly gauge whether I am the appropriate tutor.”

For music lessons, less than 20 percent are done over the Internet, Cox said. But with academic tutoring and languages, he expects a higher percentage to occur online — perhaps as much as 80 percent.

Betsy Faust has used TakeLessons to find music students online— Hayne Palmour IV

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Betsy Faust has used TakeLessons to find music students online
— Hayne Palmour IV

Miracle Pelayo, 20, spent years in a theater program and aspires to be an actress. She has an agent. She also has cerebral palsy, and uses a wheelchair.

Early this year, Pelayo auditioned for a part on a current TV show, but casting officials told her she wasn’t ready. So in June, Pelayo searched the Internet for an acting coach.

Through TakeLessons, she found Jan Linder Koda. Once a week, Pelayo gets acting lessons via Skype. “It’s a lot easier for me,” she said. “Jan is in Woodland Hills. I’m in Downey, so it’s really convenient” to use the Internet.

Pelayo recently auditioned for another part, this time on a Disney Channel show, and her agent said her tape was sent to the writers and producer by the casting director. “It turns out they really liked the character that Jan helped me prepare for,” said Pelayo. She is waiting to hear back from Disney.

TakeLessons is essentially an online middleman. But Cox argues that it’s more affordable for instructors to use TakeLessons than to buy ads themselves, and it’s more effective than hanging a brochure at a local school or store. “We make it drop-dead easy to find a service provider, manage the relationship between the two parties and finally pay over the Internet in a very safe way,” he said.